Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial

"I knew I wanted a Janet Malcolm book, and I was deciding between this one and The Journalist and the Murder . Ultimately, I thought this one fit better with the rest of the books, first because the defendant is female—another woman on trial—and also because, as Malcolm herself says of the defendant, she couldn’t have done it, but she must have done it. In a number of these cases, there’s this same difficulty in accepting the obvious solution. Like both Lizzie Borden and Constance Kent, the defendant in Malcolm’s book is an enigma. Moreover, that enigmatic quality allows the prosecution to paint her in a manner consistent with the worst, or most damning, female stereotypes, so that she becomes easier to convict. Malcolm’s style is so different from the other writers I’ve chosen. It’s so distilled; there isn’t one extra word. That’s certainly not the case with someone like William Roughead, but it’s part of the pleasure of both—they’re on different ends of a spectrum. Part of why I’m interested in trials is you have a very clear illustration of what sort of stories are persuasive to people. The prosecution and the defense each tell a story designed to convince a group of people, who are themselves specifically chosen to represent society at large. It often gives you a sense of what’s at stake in these prosecutions, beyond the fate of the individual defendant. You see the anxieties of a particular time and place and also what’s taken for granted, and doesn’t need to be spelled out. The story often has to be oversimplified to fit the constraints. The examples that I’ve chosen, either through because of their historical background or a depiction of psychological complexity, all show that it’s not such a simple story. What appealed to me about Iphigenia in Forest Hills was how Janet Malcolm points out the artificial constraints of the trial. Typically, the focus would be on how the prosecutor’s or the defense lawyer’s choices lead to the verdict. But Malcolm is really attuned to the way in which the judge is shaping the outcome as well. This particular judge seems to have very specific motivations—there’s a question of whether he really just wants it all to be done so he can go on a planned vacation, which is a little horrifying. “Malcolm shows how the judge, ruling by ruling, is tilting the case against the defendant.” But much of what Malcolm illuminates about this trial is true, in a less pronounced way, in every case. This one is just a strikingly bad example of things going off the rails. For instance, the judge insists that the defense lawyer give his summation on a Friday, rather than permitting him the necessary respite over the weekend to prepare his argument. It shows in the lawyer’s performance and seems like such a punitive decision given the stakes. But before that, she shows how the judge, ruling by ruling, is tilting the case against the defendant. Ideally, when we think of the judge as gatekeeper, who decides what evidence the jury will hear, we imagine it’s a straightforward application of the law to the facts of the case. But of course, even when judges don’t have particular agendas—as it seemed like the judge might have in this particular case—they’re inevitably making their decisions in a specific context. They must balance the probative versus the prejudicial value of evidence. They have to be attentive to what the jurors might think and they can’t make that determination without an idea of what the prejudices or the stereotypes might be. There’s a question of what feeds into a stereotype that is far from simple or reductive. It’s uncomfortable see that operate, I think. In a way, it’s similar to writing any kind of non-fiction. What details the writer selects, how those details are presented all influence the reader in ways that may not be self-evident. For example, there is something hypnotic about Malcolm’s style so that it is impossible to imagine taking a different view of the events she narrates."